Behind the Sonic Veil

2013 ◽  
pp. 117-134
Author(s):  
Ross Winning
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Frameworks ◽  
Recorded Sound ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Sound Theory ◽  
Synthetic Life ◽  
Film Sound

Drawing firstly on animation, this chapter will consider how applications of sound may demand new conceptual frameworks for animated work to develop. Making reference to audio-visual sound theory, the acousmatic and cinematic histories, the discussion surveys aspects of animation sound, and suggests the potential for exposing the sonic elements of the form to evaluation using means beyond current film-sound concepts. The application of recorded sound and the role it performs in the re-creation of synthetic life in new animated situations brings unconsidered possibilities for sound-image concepts. How sound functions and how it combines with an image on screen, in order to create a listening involvement in animation, is central to this consideration. Nevertheless, as the form transgresses, it is evolving from the structured sound space of the traditional screen; new spaces may present different challenges that motivate different sound to picture equations.

The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Electronic Sound ◽  
Recorded Sound ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Sound Technology ◽  
Sound Culture

This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan. Putting the cinema at the center of a ‘culture of the sound image’, it restores complexity to a media transition that is often described simply as slow and reluctant. In that vibrant sound culture, the talkie was introduced on the radio before it could be heard in the cinema, and pop music adaptations substituted for musicals even as cinema musicians and live narrators resisted the introduction of recorded sound. Taken together, the essays show that the development of sound technology shaped the economic structure of the film industry and its labour practices, the intermedial relation between cinema, radio, and popular music, as well as the architecture of cinemas and the visual style of individual Japanese films and filmmakers.

Sound Image and Resonant Animated Space

2015 ◽  
pp. 83-109
Author(s):  
Ross Winning
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Recorded Sound ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Primary Channel

Animation is a synthesis of ideas that often encounters unpredictable, illogical, and imagined domains. In those animated worlds, recorded sound is now part of a coalition of two sensory forms mediated through hearing and vision. Sound has therefore been embedded in the audio-visual toolbox since the successful synchronisation of sound and picture. Sonic elements now contribute significantly to how animators might shape their films and express ideas. These animated worlds also often represent deeply rooted expressions of the interior mind of the artists and animators themselves. This chapter explores the relationship of sound to image in the evolutionary and increasingly variable animated forms that are currently proliferating. It aims to focus on sound as being the primary channel that is best able to reflect those interior ideas within a range of animated media. The exploration seeks to do this through tracing proto-cinematic ideas in the art of the past and animation practice that researches the sonified and animated image using musical and figurative metaphors.

Liveness and Mediatization

2021 ◽  
pp. 98-126
Author(s):  
Tereza Havelková
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Singing Voice ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
Sound Theory ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Louis Andriessen ◽  
Film Sound

Chapter 3 approaches liveness as an effect of immediacy. It analyzes how hypermedial opera constructs an opposition between live performance and that which is “mediatized,” that is, generated or reproduced by media technology. Relying, among others, on film sound theory, the chapter shows how the effect of liveness becomes a function of a particular relationship between sound and its source, and especially voice and body. Where some scholars have played up the discrepancy between the voice heard and the body seen in opera, this chapter is attentive to how an apparent unity of voice and body is maintained within the context of hypermediacy. With the help of Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway’s opera Writing to Vermeer, the chapter suggests that an alignment of liveness with femininity and body-voice unity subverts some of the critical claims that have been made with respect to both live performance and the embodied singing voice.

scholarly journals Adapting Peircean semiotics to sound theory and practice

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-72
Author(s):  
Leo Murray
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Semiotic Model ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Sound Theory ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
Peircean Semiotics

This paper argues that the semiotic model proposed by C.S. Peirce (1839-1914) has the potential to be adapted to sound in order to provide a comprehensive conceptual framework and meta- language for describing sound both as product and as practice. The flexibility of the Peircean model means that it is ideally suited to the analysis of sound and sound/image combinations and to the analysis of audio-visual media. The starting point of the decision-making process for sound producers and designers can be framed by some fundamental questions: (a) What does the audience need to know? (b) How should the audience feel? And (c) what should they think? With the overall goal of the soundtrack being to ‘serve the needs of the story’, the choices in the soundtrack are geared around creating these understandings or emotional responses. The opening sequence from The Conversation (Coppola, 1974) is examined to illustrate the Peircean model as it is applied to sound in the audio-visual soundtrack. Viewed in this way the soundtrack can be thought of as a kind of trail of breadcrumbs, a part of the narrative which allows the audience to search for cause and consequence for themselves. A Peircean semiotic approach can then be used to inform the process of designing the soundtrack as well as aid in the analysis of the finished work. 

Hymns for the Fallen

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
War Films ◽  
Thin Red Line ◽  
Commercial Space ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
Combat Films ◽  
Red Line ◽  
War Film ◽  
Vietnam War Films ◽  
Film Sound

Hymns for the Fallen listens closely to forty years of Hollywood combat films produced after Vietnam. Ever a noisy genre, post-Vietnam war films have deployed music and sound to place the audience in the midst of battle and to stimulate reflection on the experience of combat. Considering landmark movies—such as Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, and American Sniper—as well as lesser known films, Todd Decker shows how the domain of sound, an experientially rich, culturally resonant aspect of the cinema, not only invokes the realities of war, but also shapes the American audience’s engagement with soldiers and veterans as flesh-and-blood representatives of the nation. Hymns for the Fallen explores all three elements of film sound—dialogue, sound effects, music—and considers how expressive and formal choices on the soundtrack have turned the serious war film into a patriotic ritual enacted in the commercial space of the cinema.

Film Sound

1985 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-64
Author(s):  
Robert C. Cumbow ◽  
William Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Film Sound
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